DISSENTING WORDS

A CONVERSATION WITH
JACQUES RANCIÈRE

Davide Panagia:

In your writings you highlight the political efficacy of words. In The Names of History,
for instance, this emphasis is discussed most vividly in terms of what you refer to as an
“excess of words” that marks the rise of democratic movements in the seventeenth
century. Similarly, in On The Shores of Politics, you begin your discussion with an
excursus on the end of politics as the end of the promise. Finally, in Dis-agreement you
speak of “the part of those who have no-part” as voicing a “wrong” for the sake of
equality.
In each of these instances, however, your treatment of words (and language more
generally) is very different from those thinkers of the “linguistic turn” in political phi-
losophy who expound on an ethics of deliberation as the first virtue of modern democ-
racies. For that matter, your approach is quite different from those thinkers who focus
on the aporias of language as such.
Could you discuss this thematic of the proliferation of words in your thinking about
democratic politics?
Would it be fair to characterize your research on and exposition of democratic think-
ing as a “poetics of politics”?

Rancière’s Reply:

In order to address your question adequately, it would be wise to enlarge the sense of
“linguistic turn” you invoke. In its most generally accepted sense, the linguistic turn in
philosophy consists in ascribing to linguistic processes certain phenomena and specifi-
able modes of relating objects attributed, in a previous instance, either to factual pro-
cesses or lines of thought. This approach is not limited to the two figures you invoke in
your question. The linguistic turn also has two stages of development that, from my
experience, have been more noticeable in France than in the United States. The first
phase, then, emerged with Lévi-Strauss and his structural approach to social relations
founded on a linguistic model of relationality, subsequently reprised in Lacan’s psycho-
analytic notion that “the unconscious is structured like a language” that, in its turn,
conjoins the energetic mental processes Freud discusses to linguistic practices. The pri-
macy of “the linguistic” thus granted language all the properties of the Freudian uncon-

My deepest debt of gratitude goes to Jacques Rancière, whose willingness to participate in this
interview with such thoughtful attentiveness is testament to his commitment to an ethos of intel-
lectual generosity and critical engagement. This interview could not have been possible without
the institutional and financial support of the Johns Hopkins University Center for Research on
Culture and Literature. In this regard, I would especially like to thank Frances Ferguson for her
advice and encouragement. A special note of gratitude also goes to Kirstie McClure, who not
only introduced me to Rancière’s work but also taught me to appreciate the importance of an
historically inflected mode of political thinking.

diacritics / summer 2000 diacritics 30.2: 113–26 113

scious along with those of a Marxist notion of infrastructure. The Saussurian opposition
between langue and parole provided a privileged status to a linguistic model whose role
was that of a general law that unconsciously structures the behavior of individuals and
societies. It is on the basis of these parameters that the structuralist moment of the
linguistic turn was constituted. At one and the same time, the analysis of speech acts
became first and foremost a “symptomatic” analysis of those procedures of
misrecognition that linguistically structured both the behavior of individuals and social
relations. When we “read” Le Capital with Althusser, the interpretive and methodologi-
cal schema for linguistic phenomena operated like a kind of “policing of the enunci-
ated”: that is, a search for those unsuccessful (i.e., inadequate) modes of expression that
exemplify such symptomatic procedures of misrecognition.
The second phase of the linguistic turn constituted itself more ambiguously. For
those who shared intellectual experiences similar to my own, this version involved a
critique of the langue/infrastructure model; that is, a further and more favorable consid-
eration of the value of the political and the linguistic games therein that, according to
the Althusserian/Marxist model (and, indeed, with structuralism more generally), were
to be treated as ideological artifacts. In a very real sense, it all began with the May ’68
assertion that “we are all German Jews”—an entirely ideological statement, the validity
of which, if analyzed at the level of its content, one finds to rest entirely on the capacity
to overturn the political relationship between the order of designations and that of events
by emphasizing the gap that separates subject and predicate. From there, an entire field
of understanding speech acts as political gestures opened up: a field that reconfigured
the division between words and things while rearranging the distinction between legiti-
mate and illegitimate speakers (i.e., claimants). This was the focus of my historical
research on the writings of nineteenth-century French workers, which resulted in my
The Nights of Labor. I treated these texts not as documents that either expressed or
concealed the “real” conditions of the workers and the forms of domination they had
endured but rather as evidence of the controversial polemical configurations resulting
in that form of political subjectivity known as “the worker.”
This for me has meant paying a different sort of attention to language than that
found in the tradition of “critique.” As I understand it, this latter tradition combines a
position of radical politics with a practice of interpretive suspicion guided by the idea
that words always hide something profound below the surface; the hermeneutic impera-
tive is thus to examine these substrata of meaning in order to get at some even more
profound secret. In most cases, such a “profound secret” is, in fact, an instance of domi-
nation either imposed or endured—even if it means that the mode of domination in
question is merely the domination of language itself (i.e., Roland Barthes’s “langue
fasciste”). If the fracture between these two forms of the “linguistic turn” has not been
as readily visible in the American context as it was in France, it is without a doubt
because in the United States these two modes of understanding language melded to-
gether into one overarching logic of suspicion. This is also a result of the manner in
which certain of these latter conceptualizations established a link between the two modes
of the linguistic turn you invoke, without belonging exclusively to either one. This is
precisely what has happened with Derridean deconstruction in America: in practice, it
was included as an interpretive schema that endorsed the “symptomatic reading” of the
Althusserian variety by elucidating those critical ruptures that comprised the fabric of
the text. At the same time, Derridean deconstruction altered the structural-Marxist ap-
proach, as it is, in itself, divided between two modes: on the one hand, there is the
practice of denunciative critique and on the other a practice of infinite readings.
My own intellectual effort has been to think the distance [écart] between words
differently: that is, neither on the model of a hermeneutics of suspicion nor on the

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deconstructive model of an interminable digging through the strata of metaphorical
meaning. My approach begins from a different reading of Plato’s critique of writing.
Here, the central question for me rests upon the politically fertile potential of the oppo-
sition between two differing accounts of how words circulate. The “silent” word of
writing, according to Plato, is that which will sway no matter what—making itself equally
available both to those entitled to use it and to those who are not. The availability of a
series of words lacking a legitimate speaker and an equally legitimate interlocutor inter-
rupts Plato’s logic of “the proper”—a logic that requires everyone to be in their proper
place, partaking in their proper affairs. This “excess of words” that I call literarity dis-
rupts the relation between an order of discourse and its social function. That is, literarity
refers at once to the excess of words available in relation to the thing named; to that
excess relating to the requirements for the production of life; and finally, to an excess of
words vis-à-vis the modes of communication that function to legitimate “the proper”
itself.
We can conclude, then, that humans are political animals because they are literary
animals: not only in the Aristotelian sense of using language in order to discuss ques-
tions of justice, but also because we are confounded by the excess of words in relation
to things. Humans are political animals, then, for two reasons: first, because we have
the power to put into circulation more words, “useless” and unnecessary words, words
that exceed the function of rigid designation; secondly, because this fundamental ability
to proliferate words is unceasingly contested by those who claim to “speak correctly”—
that is, by the masters of designation and classification who, by virtue of wanting to
retain their status and power, flat-out deny this capacity to speak. This is what happened
during the English Revolution of the seventeenth century, when certain popular preach-
ers learned and began to use the word tyrant (which, “technically speaking,” refers to an
ancient form of power) as a term of political contest. It is also what occurred with some
workers in the nineteenth century who began to put into circulation the word prole-
tariat, which literally means “those who multiply” and refers to a class of peoples in
ancient Roman times whose sole existence was defined in terms of their reproductive
capacity.1 In reappropriating these abandoned terms, these seventeenth-century preach-
ers and nineteenth-century workers were able to designate an entire category of politi-
cal subjectivity. Political subjectivity thus refers to an enunciative and demonstrative
capacity to reconfigure the relation between the visible and the sayable, the relation
between words and bodies: namely, what I refer to as “the partition of the sensible.”
It is in this respect that I have put into operation what I call a poetics of knowledge.2
in order to think what you refer to as a poetics of politics. The “poetic” is distinguished
from the notion of “critique as suspicion” discussed earlier by its ability to give value to
the effectivity of speech acts. To affirm the nature of the “poetic” in politics means to
assert first and foremost that politics is an activity of reconfiguration of that which is
given in the sensible. What is more, this activity also distinguishes itself from various
forms of political realism and also from the deliberative democratic model of communi-
cative rationality of the “linguistic turn” you invoked. When one distances oneself from
the symptomatic mode of critique mentioned previously, thereby taking into thoughtful
consideration those words used in various forms of sociopolitical interlocution, one
finds oneself in a problematic relation with the Habermasian critique of neoconserva-
tive poststructuralism, along with those denunciative attacks on post-’68 thought that
include a return to Kant and the Enlightenment, and so on.

1. According to the Oxford English Dictionary (2nd ed. on CD-Rom) entry for proletariat,
the term refers to “the lowest class of the community in ancient Rome, regarded as contributing
nothing to the state but offspring.”
2. See Rancière’s The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge.

diacritics / summer 2000 115

 To return to the first part of your question, then, what radically distinguishes my
thinking from a communicative rationality model is that I do not accept the premise that
there is a specific form of political rationality that may be directly deduced from the
essence of language or from the activity of communication. The Habermasian schema
presupposes, in the very logic of argumentative exchange, the existence of a priori prag-
matic constraints that compel interlocutors to enter into a relation of intercomprehension,
if they wish to be self-coherent. This presupposes further that both the interlocutors and
the objects about which they speak are preconstituted; whereas, from my perspective,
there can be political exchange only when there isn’t such a preestablished agreement—
not only, that is, regarding the objects of debate but also regarding the status of the
speakers themselves. It is this phenomenon that I call disagreement, and it is this logic
of disagreement that is exemplified in the plebeian secession at Aventin to which I often
refer: the patricians at Aventin do not understand what the plebeians say; they do not
understand the noises that come out of the plebeians’ mouths, so that, in order to be
audibly understood and visibly recognized as legitimate speaking subjects, the plebe-
ians must not only argue their position but must also construct the scene of argumenta-
tion in such a manner that the patricians might recognize it as a world in common. The
principle of political interlocution is thus disagreement; that is, it is the discordant un-
derstanding of both the objects of reference and the speaking subjects. In order to enter
into political exchange, it becomes necessary to invent the scene upon which spoken
words may be audible, in which objects may be visible, and individuals themselves may
be recognized. It is in this respect that we may speak of a poetics of politics.
In order to account for this, we require a poetics of knowledge. This means an
operation on the objects of knowledge and on the modes of knowing that brings them to
the level of a common language and of the invention, within this common language, of
various modes of argumentation and manifestation. For example, in The Nights of La-
bor it was necessary for me to extract the workers’ texts from the status that social or
cultural history assigned to them—a manifestation of a particular cultural condition. I
looked at these texts as inventions of forms of language similar to all others. The pur-
chase of their political valence was thus in their revindication of the efficacy of the
literary, of the egalitarian powers of language, indifferent with respect to the status of
the speaker. This poetic operation on the objects of knowledge puts into play their po-
litical dimension, which elides a sociocultural reading. This same operation can occur
with the discourses of knowledge: it would require that one subtract the sociological or
historical discourse, for example, from the forms of autolegitimation upon which it
rests by arguing for the specificity of their objects and methods. This does not mean
having to assert that these discourses are nothing other than fictions or processes of
metaphorization, as some would have us believe. Rather it requires the assertion that
these knowledge-discourses, like other modes of discourse, use common powers of
linguistic innovation in order to make objects visible and available to thinking, in order
to create connections between objects, etc. This requires having to reintegrate these
discourses into a generally accessible mode of reasoning or form of language so that
everyone may partake in this creative activity of invention that allows for a redescrip-
tion and reconfiguration of a common world of experience. While a poetics of politics is
a challenge to the opposition between legitimate and illegitimate speakers, a poetics of
knowledge presents a challenge to the divisions between the disciplines and the dis-
courses of knowledge.

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 2

Davide Panagia:

Many of your more recent writings focus on the classically vexed relationship between
doxa and philosophy, where you consider this problem to be a problem for politics. In
this regard you state in your preface to Dis-agreement that “the basis of philosophy’s
dispute with politics is the very reduction of the rationality of disagreement” [xii]. In
your preceding works, however, you give a more generous account of this tension when
you state that “it will perhaps be more interesting to take a closer look at the duplicity
involved in this realization/suppression of politics, which is simultaneously a suppres-
sion/realization of philosophy” [On the Shores of Politics 3].
Did a change take place in your position regarding the relationship between phi-
losophy and politics from the time you wrote the articles that comprise On the Shores of
Politics to the time when you wrote Dis-agreement?
If so, what brought about this change in emphasis between the “duplicity” of poli-
tics and philosophy on the one hand, and the dialectical opposition between philosophy
and politics on the other?

Rancière’s Reply:

You’re correct in sensing a shift. There is a notable development between the first es-
says in On the Shores of Politics (written from 1986 to 1988) and Dis-agreement or my
“Dix thèses sur la politique” (written from 1994 to 1996).3 A development, that is, not
only in my own thinking but also in the political context that I was responding to and
addressing.
In order to explain and mark this shift more clearly, we might begin by delimiting
what has been a constant concern in my intellectual pursuits since the 1970s: namely,
the desire to evince what I call “la métapolitique,”4 by which I mean that element that
brings political or ideological “appearances” back to the reality of socioeconomic rela-
tions—whether or not this reality is conceived in terms of a Marxist notion of produc-
tion or a Tocquevillian idea of equality. What is ultimately important for me is to dis-
miss the facile opposition between a plane of appearances and a plane of reality and to
show, as I attempted in The Nights of Labor, how it is that the “social”—a category
supposedly intended to explain away and thereby refute the “ideological”—is in fact
constituted by a series of discursive acts and reconfigurations of a perceptive field.
It is from this problematic that I began, in the 1980s, to tackle the question of
democracy. Here I pursued a double-sided imperative: on the one hand, I wanted to
refute the Marxist opposition between “real” and “formal” democracy while at the same
time refuting the notion that the shape of democracy can be easily reconciled with con-
stitutional forms of governance. Thus, the essay that discusses “the forms of democ-
racy” in On the Shores of Politics5 is an effort at trying to eschew this double reduction-
ist gesture by granting the democratic mode of being its proper status as a mode of being
in common [existence en commun]. In order to constitute such an image, it was incum-
bent upon me to inscribe in this logic of rehabilitation and play of appearances certain

3. Although not yet available in English, “Dix thèses sur la politique” appears as an appen-
dix to the second edition of Aux bords du politique.
4. For a further elaboration of this concept, see Rancière’s Dis-agreement, chapter 4: “From
Archipolitics to Metapolitics.”
5. See chapter 2: “The Uses of Democracy.”

diacritics / summer 2000 117

conceptualizations that were responsive to various heterogeneous logics. In this man-
ner, I reintroduced Plato’s critique of a democratic conception of the good [le “bon
plaisir” de l’homme democratique] so as to extract from it a positive notion of democ-
racy as a mode of being and as a collective form of symbolization that stands in opposi-
tion to the notion of democracy as a mere form of state. I then incorporated into this
more playful notion of democracy two other principles: first, Aristotle’s notion of an
“art of politics,” which involves the ability to domesticate appearances and to use “good
devices” (i.e., good sophismata) in order to “demonstrate” [faire voir] democracy to the
democrats, oligarchy to the oligarchs, etc.—thereby guaranteeing the existence of friend-
ship within the polity. Secondly, I turned to the practices of workers of the 1830s who
asked for “equal relations with the owners” and whose strikes became a staging of such
a form of equality. I thus placed on the same plane of appearance—that is, on the same
configuration of appearances and the same valorization of the “artificial” dimension of
a being in common—the workers’ political practice of a transgressive representation of
equality and the art of government, both of which functioned to create a trompe l’oeil
effect of friendship between the rich and the poor. With these examples in mind, I con-
trasted this more “positive” notion of appearance and “artifice of equality” to those
practices of demystification that reproduce the old cognitive schema (exemplified, for
instance, in Bourdieuvian sociology) that assumes the operation of power by means of
the subject’s own misrecognition.
This latter framework quickly reveals itself as untenable in “The End of Politics or
The Realist Utopia” essay.6 This text is intended as a philosophical commentary on a
particular electoral event: namely, Mitterand’s 1988 reelection and the mise-en-scène it
involved. In response to Chirac, who presented himself as the spokesperson for the
“new forces” of a productive economic life in France, Mitterand presented himself as
the archaic patriarch who symbolically guaranteed the integrity of the social whole
against the ever-present hazards of civil war and social dissolution, a menace that took
hold in France with the spectacular rise of the extreme racist right most vividly embod-
ied in Le Pen’s xenophobic party. The essay in question thus stages a fundamental para-
dox that, upon later reflection, appeared to me as a kind of sophism. Mitterand’s “com-
edy of the archaic” became identified with the kind of art of politics that could appease
conflict. This pacific art of politics became further identified with an Aristotelian notion
of a “politics of friendship,” all the while keeping an eye on the Freudian wisdom that
opposes the necessity of symbols for a neurotic life in common to the great psychotic
catastrophe. Politics, I suggested, has always consisted in suppressing “the political” so
as to realize it. Admittedly, this position insists too strongly upon a valorization of demo-
cratic artifice. It tends to identify this artifice with a “comedy of power,” and the text
demonstrates how “the suppression of the political” is, in effect, an ambiguous expres-
sion. This “comedy of power” had the pretense of driving away the prepolitical pack;
but, in order for this to occur, it also had to do away with the political itself, that is, with
the structural antagonism of a life in common. The essay thus affirms that that which
opposes itself to the fury of the silent, the pure hatred of “the other,” is not peace but a
different kind of struggle: it is not a “comedy of power” but a divisive act of the demos
understood as the power of dissolution. That is, it is the idea of political conflict under-
stood as a specific kind of symbolization of alterity and not the parading of the kind of
power that acts as the guarantor of “the One.”
In my text, there was thus an untenable conflation of “the political,” understood as
the power of a disincorporated collectivity, with the art of politics, understood philo-
sophically as that mode of governance that can guarantee peace. To put the matter bluntly,

6. Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, chapter 1.

118
the Aristotelian art of government does not heal Marxist metapolitics: the 1980s did
announce themselves as a “return to the political” but this return to the political and,
more emphatically, to “political philosophy” quickly became equated with a return to
order per se; and the problematic alliance between the wisdom of Mitterand (“the come-
dian of power”) and that of Aristotle (“the philosopher”) became the rule that structured
the alliance between those who govern and “political philosophers.” The return to “po-
litical philosophy” in the prose of Ferry, Renaut, and other proponents of what is re-
ferred to, on your side of the Atlantic, as “New French Thought” simply identified the
political with the state, thereby placing the tradition of political philosophy in the ser-
vice of the platitudes of a politics of consensus; this occurring all the while under the
rubric of wanting to restore and protect the political against the encroachments of the
social. What also became strikingly apparent was that what was initially endorsed as a
“politics of consensus” was wholly other than the “party of social peace”: the consensus
model resulted in the destruction of the political along with the reestablishment of rac-
ism and xenophobia. Consensus in effect became the suppression of the litigiousness
constitutive of the political, and identitarianism became the flip side of this suppression;
that is, it became the malady of consensus politics.
It thus seemed crucial to challenge the marriage of the political with this “art of
friendship” or this “living in common” that confounds the manifestations of the politi-
cal with the shrewdness of power. It was necessary to “take a closer look”7 at this real-
ization/suppression of the political that exemplified an Aristotelian politics of friend-
ship. It was necessary to show that this form of parapolitics belongs to the same sup-
pressive logic as a Platonic archipolitics that attempts to abolish a democratic space in
order to institute a community of “the One” or, further, a Marxist metapolitics that
assigns to democratic instances the profound reality of relations of production and class
exploitation. It was necessary, finally, to pinpoint, at a global level, political philosophy’s
gesture of distancing the political under the pretext of grounding politics on an ideal of
an ordered living in common. In my own work, I demonstrated how that which is proper
to the political is precisely an absence of the “proper.” It is from the political’s litigious
character of supplementarity that one may derive the “simple necessities” of a life in
common or the general attributes of a “politicity” [de la politicité]. Under these three
forms—archipolitics, parapolitics, and metapolitics—the encounters between philoso-
phy and the political have been conflictual encounters whereby philosophy’s primary
move has been to extract the inherent quality of dissension from the political either by
suppressing it (Plato), by pacifying it (Aristotle), or by displacing it (Marx) in order to
grant the political its “true foundation.”
It was crucial for me to mark this fundamental tension in order to distinguish poli-
tics from the project of consensus and its rationalization in the “return of the political”
movement in France. But that which initially separates does not stop itself from inter-
mingling: the suppression/realization of philosophy is just such an instance of confluence.
On the one hand, political philosophy incorporates within itself those political para-
doxes it attempts to eschew—and the Aristotelian use of contrarieties is an exemplary
instance of this: these contrarieties are welcomed by Aristotelian thinking; they are
reworked and reformulated. And in this manner, the enterprise of philosophy provided
the political with scenarios and scenes of dissension. This gesture does not merely refer
to the old adage of putting on ancient garb for the sake of producing modern revolutions
but rather evinces [shows, demonstrates, or illustrates] how those contract scenarios
implicit in the concept of sovereignty—elaborated in order to ground and protect the

7. In his original French reply, Rancière uses this English expression and places it in quota-
tion marks.

diacritics / summer 2000 119

rights of princes in the face of aristocratic, popular, and religious revolts—serve to
produce a revolutionary mise-en-scène of the rights of the people. In a similar fashion,
Marxist scenarios do not stop the alimentation of dissension onto the same democratic
stage they fervently attempt to overcome. Finally, politics and political philosophy have
not stopped pillaging each other’s arsenal so as to perfect it and use it against each other.

Davide Panagia:

It has been commented upon by some that it is hard to categorize your writings. That is,
your work is at once philosophical and literary, historical and political. I have at times
been asked, when discussing your works in a public setting, to explain whether you are
a philosopher, a historian, a political thinker, or a literary critic. It seems to me that these
questions are misleading. That is, I find the critical force of your writings to rest on a
sense of contemporaneity of forms and historical sensibilities. By this, I mean that your
writings make at one and the same time a gesture toward one form of knowledge (i.e.,
philosophy) while discussing another (i.e., politics). As well, there is a sense of
contemporaneity in your use of historical examples and your discussion of historical
figures.
In this regard, especially, I am reminded of your treatment of Jacotot in your The
Ignorant Schoolmaster, where the historical example of the figure of Jacotot also ad-
dresses a series of questions brought to the fore during the debates regarding educa-
tional reform in France in the mid 1980s.
Can you comment upon the role that the historical example, whether an event like
Mitterand’s reelection or a figure like Jacotot, plays in your writings and your particular
sense of the historical?
Am I correct in characterizing your treatment of these matters as one of the
“contemporaneity” of historical emergences?

Rancière’s Reply:

By the notion of contemporaneity I understand two things: the first is that an object of
reflection commands the aperture of a specific temporality. That is, it commands the
presence of a process of writing, of the construction of a specific form of writing, ori-
ented toward an intrusive encounter with a specific mode of thinking that, in its turn,
creates a particular thought-event by interrupting the organization of a class of objects
or a series of performances. Thinking for me is always a rethinking. It is an activity that
displaces an object away from the site of its original appearance or attending discourse.
Thinking means to submit an object of thought to a specific variation that includes a
shift in its discursive register, its universe of reference, or its temporal designations. In
the case of Mitterand that you mention, I extracted the event of an election from the
field of political sociology in order to conceptualize a variation of the foundational
narratives of political philosophy. I considered how it is that that which is given to
thought as an object of political inquiry was also a mise-en-scène of various roles and
postures and not necessarily the content of policy programs or their relation to different
social forces, economic imperatives, etc. It is this staging that determines the conditions
for a constitutive rethinking; that is to say, it is a restaging. The elaboration of these
“moments of thinking” is for me the task of a philosophy that challenges the boundaries
separating the classes of discourses. Returning once again to my The Nights of Labor, I

120
extracted those worker’s texts from their socioeconomic links so as to read them as
antiplatonic philosophical myths while at once exposing the history of a specific gen-
eration of peoples marked by such a foundational event as the Paris revolt of July 1830,
an event that played a role comparable, perhaps, to the one May ’68 played for my own
generation (with its own battle cry that “Nothing will be as before”). In both instances,
what is required is a staging of this mythico-philosophical event that marks the advent
of thinking for those who were not initially destined to think. This staging implicates a
theoretical framework that is, at once, a biographical framework: one that does not
focus exclusively on life histories but rather on privileged moments of experience of a
life that becomes a kind of writing (the equivalent, I would say, of those interlacing
monologues comprising the lives of six people found in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves).
Similarly, in The Ignorant Schoolmaster, I extracted a character that had the stature
of a curiosity within the history of pedagogy. This history is comprised of such curiosi-
ties, of such stories of original or delirious inventors who overcome seemingly insur-
mountable challenges which then become the grounding for a mad prehistory of “rea-
sonable” methods of teaching and learning. With Jacotot, I uncovered a figure whose
“originality” was grounded precisely in his ability to interrogate the traditional link
between utopian extravagance and a reasonable methodology, and I projected this fig-
ure bluntly upon the scene of the pedagogical debates occurring in France while I was
writing: debates that, at the time, opposed those sociologists who proposed the reduc-
tion of inequalities by adopting certain methods of learning (more amenable to various
disenfranchised classes) to proponents of a “republican” school of pedagogical thought
that promoted the ideal of equality of learning through a universalism of knowledge. I
thus organized a “contemporaneous confrontation” by presenting Jacotot not as the rep-
resentative of a rehabilitative educational strategy but rather, as a philosophico-mythi-
cal figure who marks—in all his philosophical and political radicality—certain egalitar-
ian stakes by not making equality an end that needed to be achieved but rather by con-
sidering it the axiom of a kind of thinking. What was required was a specific enunciative
form that abolished the distance between these two poles. The Ignorant Schoolmaster
could thus just as well be read as a philosophical narrative of a purely fictitious hero as
much as it could be read as the contemporary excursus of an atemporal student of Jacotot.
To construct a specific present—that is, a sound chamber for the resonances of an
event of thinking—thus requires a double transgression. On the one hand, it is incum-
bent to transgress the divisions of discourse: divisions that separate the disciplines (phi-
losophy, political science, history, etc.), the divisions of noble and profane discourse,
the divisions between a logic comprised of links in a chain of real events and the logic
of a chain of fictional events. On the other hand, it is imperative to revoke the authorita-
tive principle derived from the succession of historical events. And it is the implications
derived from this second transgressive imperative that I understand to be critical to an
idea of contemporaneity. To conceptualize the “contemporaneity” of thought requires
the reliance on a certain anachronism or untimeliness.
In the early stages of my work there was, without a doubt, a desire on my part to
return to some historical “real” in order to overcome a “metaphysics of history.” Spe-
cifically, I began by searching in the archives for examples from the writings of workers
so as to respond to the Marxist discourse on history, on the workers’ movement, etc. But
I quickly realized that such a return to the “real” did not, in and of itself, change the
theoretical terms of the game. It was entirely useless to discover a mode of speaking
proper to workers [une parole ouvrière] that the Marxist enterprise had overlooked.
What is necessary is to liberate such a word from the dictates of historicism itself since
it is indubitably the case that historicism is as much a discourse of propriety—of keep-
ing things “in their place”—as any other. Whenever we say “such and such an example

diacritics / summer 2000 121

pertains to a philosophy, a history, a literature, or a sociology,” we are at one and the
same time asserting that these things can be explained only in terms of their specific
place and time: Jacotot belongs to his time, proletarians belong to an age of capitalism,
etc. This is the fundamental conception of history established by the “histoire des
mentalités” exemplified by the Annales school: Lucien Febvre demonstrates how Rabelais
cannot be an atheist because atheism was not a concept available in Rabelais’s time;
while Leroy-Ladurie demonstrates, in a similar fashion, how the Cathar heresy was the
result of the lifestyle of a specific village. In these latter instances there is also a prin-
ciple of contemporaneity at work but it is a sense of contemporaneity that is in direct
contrast to the one I propose in my writings. It is a sense of contemporaneity that re-
stricts inquiry as it asserts that one can only think what a specific time and place allows
us to think. It is yet another instance of that Platonic impulse to “the proper” I have been
discussing throughout this interview, and it is this impulse that structures what I oppose
in my intellectual pursuits. To explicate a phenomenon by referring it to “it’s time”
means to put into play a metaphysical principle of authority camouflaged as a method-
ological precept of historical inquiry. What I attempted to explicate, both in The Names
of History and Dis-agreement, is how the limit of this mode of thinking can be found in
extreme instances like historical revisionism; i.e., that which cannot conform to a legiti-
mate time could not have occurred and therefore never existed.
My own sense of “contemporaneity” opposes this identitarian presentism. It is al-
ways untimely or anachronistic. In this manner, to mark the event of a worker’s utter-
ances presupposes the restaging of certain entirely anachronistic, symbolic oppositions—
those found in the etymology of proletarius or in the ancient philosophical theorization
of “leisure” [otium]. There is thinking when one authorizes oneself to think—within the
context of a different time and place—what that particular time considered illegitimate
to thinking. Jacotot is a figure entirely constructed within an Enlightenment frame of
reason. We can assert that he is of another time than the one in which he intervenes—a
time, that is, even stranger than our own. But this is not the end of the story; rather, the
end of the affair is that Jacotot derails the logic that connects a Cartesian spirit of “natu-
ral enlightenment” with that of Enlightenment reason itself and with a certain sense of
institutional progress that sustains modern educational systems. In short, he transforms
Enlightenment reason into a folly. Such a notion of reason had promised a future of
“progress” by entrusting to educators the slow and determined conduct of individuals
and peoples. This ideal of progress thus coincides perfectly with the progress of an
educational system based on the historicist notion of a slow and careful education of a
people; equally applicable to that pervasive sociologizing vision that, in our day, is
committed to the reduction of cultural inequalities. By combining the pedagogical logic
of the Enlightenment with the Cartesian notion that everyone possesses natural reason,
Jacotot transforms Enlightenment reason into something seemingly foolish in the light
of conventional wisdom. He derives the “mad” notion that all intelligence is equal and
that this equality is a presupposition that requires demonstration and not a goal that
needs to be attained; and finally, he derives the notion that the ideals of progress and
progressive movement are, in and of themselves, principles of inequality by proposing
equality as a social end and entrusting certain educational “experts” with the task of
reducing the effects of the clash between an “equality to come” with existing inequality
means, in short, to institute inequality as a principle whose reproduction is infinite.
Jacotot thus contrasts his ideal of intellectual emancipation to the common ideal of
progress that sustains both the large and small undertakings of the education of children
and peoples of all ages. It is this radical and provocative gesture that I found necessary
to evince. But in order to do this, it was inadequate to simply oppose Jacotot’s ideas to
those that were currently in place. Rather it became necessary to constitute the present

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of a unique history so as to create a fracture in our own present; by which I mean in our
own manner of according to the present its past and its future, and the conditions of
possibility and potentiality contained therein. It is this sense of narration and evocation
that I privilege. Admittedly, it would be banal to assert that such and such a thinker is
our contemporary. However, it seems to me a different thing altogether to construct a
contemporaneity between a thinker’s thought and our own: in order to constitute a mo-
ment in thinking, a moment that gives itself to thought, it is perhaps always necessary
for there to be two temporalities at work; in order to constitute an object of thought it is
perhaps equally necessary to have two different registers of discourse in play.

Davide Panagia:

In a 1996 Times Literary Supplement review of your On the Shores of Politics the re-
viewer refers to your work as “desirable dissent.” Dissensus is, of course, an important
aspect of your work and is a primary “anti-principle” of your notion of democracy. In
contradistinction to the consensus-oriented liberal ideal of equality as the “summation”
of political interest, you posit “division” as the political calculus par excellence.
I have the sense that your discussion of dissensus as a democratic mode of thinking
also involves a critique of leftist politics in Europe. On this rendering, “division” as a
privileged anti-principle of democratic action is intended to counter the centripetal ten-
dencies of current leftist political parties that, for the sake of a broader electoral base,
move closer and closer to the center. Immediate examples that jump to mind are Tony
Blair’s vision of the Labour party in Britain or Italy’s Ulivo party formed by the current
President of the European Commission, Romano Prodi.
Could you comment on this importantly litigious anti-principle of dissensus and
how you distinguish it from conventional accounts of democracy as the competition of
interests between individuals and groups?

Rancière’s Reply:

In effect, my reflections on politics were oriented toward a consideration of the devel-

opment of the consensualist ideology both in France and with regard to European so-
cialism throughout the 1990s. Here the difficulty is in identifying what consensus means:
it doesn’t merely refer to a taste for discussion and/or social and political peace. Con-
sensus refers to the configuration of a field of perception-in-common, an instance of
what I have called the “partition of the sensible,” even before it becomes a predisposi-
tion toward deliberation. Consensus means the sharing of a common and nonlitigious
experience: its essence is the affirmation of the preconditions that determine political
choice as objective and univocal. “Consensus discourse” in political thought asserts
that political action is circumscribed by a series of large-scale economic, financial, de-
mographic, and geostrategic equivalences. Under this rubric, politics—conceived as
the action of governments—consists in the adoption of the constraints of these large
equivalences along with an attitude of arbitration directed at the residual and marginal
possibilities left behind. On the basis of “the given,” the right and the left are supposed
to make different choices; to do more (the left) or do less (the right) regarding redistri-
bution. In this regard, the left might make more of the “social” or the “cultural,” but this
is only marginal. The ideal of consensus affirms that what is essential to a life in com-
mon depends on objective equilibriums toward which we may all orient ourselves.

diacritics / summer 2000 123

 Now, this affirmation of “objective givens” handled by the “experts in power” is
precisely the negation of the political; it defines what I have proposed to call “the po-
lice.”8 The category of “the police,” as I intend it, is neither a repressive instrument nor
the idea of a “control on life” theorized by Foucault. The essence of the police is the
principle of saturation; it is a mode of the partition of the sensible that recognizes nei-
ther lack nor supplement. As conceived by “the police,” society is a totality comprised
of groups performing specific functions and occupying determined spaces. From the
ancient divisions of the orders of society to the modern gestation of the flux of wealth,
populations, and opinions, history is replete with examples of this phenomenon. The
political is what disturbs this order by introducing either a supplement or a lack. The
essence of the political is dissensus; but dissensus is not the opposition of interests and
opinions. It is a gap in the sensible: the political persists as long as there is a dissensus
about the givens of a particular situation, of what is seen and what might be said, on the
question of who is qualified to see or say what is given. This means that the political is
not comprised of the conflict of interests and values between groups nor of the arbitra-
tion by the state between these values and interests. The political is comprised of spe-
cific subjects that are outnumbered with respect to the count of the objective whole of
the population. It is this definition of politics that is involved in the very concept of the
demos. The demos is thus neither the sum of the population nor the disfavored element
therein; nor, inversely, is it its ideal representation. We know that the term “democracy”
derives historically from the Athenian name of the reforms enacted by Clisthene, who
reorganized the ancient tribes into demes:9 territorially separated circumscriptions; an
abstract and artificial space that was constituted as such. This constitution shattered the
territorial power of the owners, and, more generally, it shattered a logic that consecrated
power to those who had a “natural” entitlement to exercise it. It is this symbolic rupture
that is, for me, the instituting principle of politics. The demos is, properly speaking, an
excessive part—the whole of those who are nothing, who do not have specific proper-
ties allowing them to exercise power. This is what is stated, a contrario, in an astonish-
ing section of Book III of Plato’s Laws. This text first adumbrates all the necessary titles
required to exercise power: age, birth, wealth, knowledge, and virtue. Now, at the end of
this list is an anomaly regarding a kind of power attributed to chance (Plato ironically
refers to this as the “choice of god”); it is a specific kind of power for those who are not
entitled to exercise power. Plato, the quintessential opponent of democracy, has given it
its most crystalline definition: democracy is not a political regime, in the sense of a
constitutional form; nor is it a form of life (as we learn through Tocquevillian sociol-
ogy) or a culture of pluralism and tolerance. Democracy is, properly speaking, the sym-
bolic institution of the political in the form of the power of those who are not entitled to
exercise power—a rupture in the order of legitimacy and domination. Democracy is the
paradoxical power of those who do not count: the count of “the unaccounted for.”10
The notion of dissensus thus means the following: politics is comprised of a sur-
plus of subjects that introduce, within the saturated order of the police, a surplus of
objects. These subjects do not have the consistency of coherent social groups united by
common property or a common birth, etc. They exist entirely within the act, and their
actions are the manifestation of a dissensus; that is, the making contentious of the giv-
ens of a particular situation. The subjects of politics make visible that which is not

8. See the chapter entitled “Wrong: Politics and Police” in Rancière’s Dis-agreement.
9. Demes were townships or divisions of ancient Attica. In modern Greece the term refers to
communes.
10. In Dis-agreement, Rancière formulates this paradox in this way: “Politics exists wher-
ever the count of parts and parties of society is disturbed by the inscription of a part of those who
have no part” [123].

124
perceivable, that which, under the optics of a given perceptive field, did not possess a
raison d’être, that which did not have a name. The extreme case of this is exemplified in
the parable of plebeian secession of which I spoke earlier where the patricians could not
even hear that the plebeians were speaking and where the latter had to construct a po-
lemical scene so that the “noises” that came out of their mouths could count as argu-
mentative utterances. This extreme situation recalls what constitutes the ground of po-
litical action: certain subjects that do not count create a common polemical scene where
they put into contention the objective status of what is “given” and impose an examina-
tion and discussion of those things that were not “visible,” that were not accounted for
previously.
Consensus is thus not another manner of exercising democracy, less heroic and
more pragmatic: one does not “practice” democracy except under the form of these
mises-en-scènes that reconfigure the relations of the visible and the sayable, that create
new subjects and supplementary objects. Consensus, thus understood, is the negation of
the democratic basis for politics: it desires to have well-identifiable groups with spe-
cific interests, aspirations, values, and “culture.”
On this rendering, then, your metaphor of centripetal and centrifugal forces is mis-
leading. Consensualist centrism flourishes with the multiplication of differences and
identities. It nourishes itself with the complexification of the elements that need to be
accounted for in a community, with the permanent process of autorepresentation, with
all the elements and all their differences: the larger the number of groups and identities
that need to be taken into account in society, the greater the need for arbitration. The
“one” of consensus nourishes itself with the multiple—or, perhaps, with a certain idea
of the multiple that allows itself to be objectified and counted. What consensualism
rejects, on the other hand, is the multiple that functions as a supplement to the count and
as a break in the autorepresentational logic of society, that is, the supplementary mul-
tiple of political subjects. We know that consensualism’s taste for the free circulation of
wealth has, as its corollary, a concern to limit the circulation of populations and espe-
cially of poorer populations. Our governments—declaring themselves obligated to the
principle of the free circulation of goods and, through international agreements, commit
themselves to the progressive dissolution of ancient nationalist and protectionist sys-
tems—rediscover all the prerogatives of the nation-state when they choose to limit im-
migration.
European “socialists” are wholeheartedly committed to this logic. As for the emer-
gence of alternative movements, this is entirely dependent upon the possibility of creat-
ing new forms of subjectification that break with the actual separation of domains of
contestation. Ancient forms of political subjectification—the subjectification of work-
ers, for instance—rested on the capacity to universalize particular conflicts as general
instances of dissensus and were based on large-scale scenes of confrontation between
the logic of politics and the logic of the police. In this regard, those internationalist and
anti-imperialist movements of the 1960s addressed their own states as ones engaged in
colonial or neocolonial wars. Today, this scene is fractured. The responsibility of order
is divided in an indecisive manner between nation-states, international institutions, and
a faceless world-order: a center that is both everywhere and nowhere. Certainly the
capitalist order—or disorder—engenders forms of struggle. There are, at a national level,
social movements committed to the struggle against the destruction of ancient systems
of social protection. These movements are not merely movements that “defend privi-
leges” that the majority opinion denounces. They have a political signification in that
they contest the consensualist dogma regarding the existence of objective social givens
against which the nation-state would be helpless. There are national and international
movements that attack consensualist logic by illuminating the forms of exclusion it

diacritics / summer 2000 125

engenders, movements of the unemployed, of the “sans papiers” that the state excludes
from the “free circulation” it endorses by not granting them legal status. There are,
finally, movements that address international economic institutions, as we witnessed in
Seattle. These different kinds of movements have in common a desire to question the
consensualist logic and to bring to the fore the contradictions of consensualism. At the
same time, they also share in a desire to challenge the old oppositions between politics
and syndicalism, or the avant-garde and mass movements. But it is true that the separa-
tion of these scenes makes their unification into transversal forms of subjectification
close to impossible: there is no statist scene to confront. The struggle is against the
“marché mondial” that is everywhere and nowhere so that there is no incarnation of the
adversary on a specific scene. The struggle against liberal globalization thus results in a
confusion, in giving support to the nation-state as such. However, the modes of intellec-
tual justification of the consensualist order have lost the authority they had at the begin-
ning of the previous decade. Politics today is difficult, but it is rethinkable: it is once
again possible to separate politics, in principle, from the gestation of the flux of popula-
tions and goods.

Conducted and translated by Davide Panagia

WORKS CITED
Carrier, Peter. “Desirable Dissent.” Rev. of On the Shores of Politics. Times Literary
Supplement 14 June 1996: 29.
Rancière, Jacques. Dis-agreement: Politics and Philosophy. Trans. Julie Rose. Minne-
apolis : U of Minnesota P, 1998.
________
. “Dix thèses sur la politique.” Aux bords du politique. 2nd ed. Paris: La Fabrique,
1998. 164–85.
________
. The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation. Trans.
and intro. Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1991.
________
. The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge. Trans. Hassan Melehy.
Foreword by Hayden White. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994.
________
. The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Trans.
John Drury. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1989.
________
. On the Shores of Politics. Trans. Liz Heron. London: Verso, 1995.

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